About Me

Bilingual Roman Catholic priest of the Southern Dominican Province. The "homilettes" on this website are completely the work of Fr. Mele. He may be contacted at cmeleop@yahoo.com.
Telephone: (415) 279-9234.

The eighty year-old women knelt beside her bed every
night.Rosary in hand, she prayed for
her family.She did not have children of
her own; she never married.But she
prayed for her sisters and brother, her nephews and niece, and her grand-nieces
and nephew.Did she pray for
herself?Probably she did since her life
was not the happiest.Her solitariness likely
called within her like a broken record, “What’s wrong with you, Mary?What’s wrong with you?

In today’s gospel Jesus particularly invites those who never
married and the widowed, the divorced and homosexuals who try to live chastely to
share their burden with him.He will
give them support because he too felt loneliness as a burden.He never married but that does not seem to
have caused him grief.Rather it was
being betrayed by one trusted disciple and denied by another, being condemned
by the leaders of his nation and being scorned by Rome, the supposedly great
defenders of justice at the time, that made him feel abandoned.His forlornness is dramatically demonstrated
on the cross when he cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Jesus asks all of us to take upon ourselves this yoke of loneliness.He wants us to love one another – both friend
and foe – even when it is difficult.It
seems like a daunting challenge, but it turns out to be the way to happiness, precisely
because we share it with him.